Lol I stayed away because the anticompetitiveness was immediately obvious (they should have opened with the free games but showed their hand early by starting with exclusivity deals), but I’m not surprised it gets even worse.
Yeah, they expressed that they wanted to join the online game store scene and the big feature they were offering to draw in users was… anticompetitive exclusivity deals!
Plus the company killed off the unreal tournament franchise because they didn’t want it to compete with fortnite.
I have no interest in supporting a company that thinks removing options is the best way to get users to use their products.
It’s the same shit that has turned streaming services from great back when it was new to now having content spread across many competing services. I’d rather they competed based on their own platform’s features and advantages than the whole “if you want to watch x, you must use service y”. It’s just a series of mini monopolies.
Does it also include those cutscenes where you have to press a button that pops up on the screen or you have to start the cutscene over again?
I hate those because:
Every console has a different layout for basically the same buttons.
I like cut scenes being little breaks where you just watch and soak it in. At least assuming the character doesn’t make choices I hate or suddenly surrenders because a few enemies point weapons at them (after probably having fought more of those enemies actually using their weapons instead of just threatening it).
If I’ve seen a cutscene already, I’d rather skip it and get back to the good gameplay. Maybe the interaction was intended to reduce that “go away cutscene, you’re boring, I want to get back to the fun stuff” but I don’t find it accomplishes that at all.
It’s not good gameplay. Even if I don’t end up panicking and hitting a wrong button or missing it because I’m not ready to think about where the X button is on this particular controller, it’s not rewarding at all to succeed, other than the “yay, I don’t have to repeat this stupid shit anymore”.
And I especially hate ones that prompt mashing buttons as fast as you can or rotating a stick as fast as you can (and this applies outside of cutscenes, too). I don’t find anything interesting about testing the physical limits of my thumbs and wearing down the buttons or sticks involved faster in the process.
Like the driver for controlling one vendor’s LED lights had a generic PCI FW updater (or something similar) included that it exposed to user space. This meant a) changing the LED colours or parameters required a firmware update rather than the firmware handling input from the system to adjust colours without new code, and b) other software could use this and just change the bus id of the target to update other firmware willy nilly.
It also had to compete for bus time and sending a full firmware update takes more time than a few colour update parameters. Average case might be ok, but it would make worst case scenarios worse, like OS wants to page in from disk 1 while a game needs to read shader code from disk 2 that it needs to immediately send to the GPU but the led controller decides it’s time to switch to the next theme in the list oh and there’s some packets that just came in over the network and the audio buffer is getting low. GPU ends up missing a frame deadline for the display engine and your screen goes black for a second while it re-establishes the connection between GPU and monitor.
With the caveat that there’s a lot of space in which users can do things that even kernel level anti-cheat can’t detect. Like it can’t see what’s going on inside plugged in hardware to know if an attached video capture device and the mouse and keyboard is actually all connected to an embedded system that analyses the video stream and adjusts the actual user input to automatically fire if it detects an enemy that would be hit or to nudge the looking direction a bit so that firing would hit.
I’ve also seen reports of exploits that use the presence of cheat detection combined with other exploits to install cheats on target systems to get their target banned from the game entirely. Which both forces them to deal with a situation they never intended to in the first place (they never tried to cheat), it also gives plausible deniability to actual cheaters who get caught.
One of those cases happened during a live tournament. Dude is playing and all of a sudden can see enemy locations through walls. He knew what was up and left the game to avoid being banned, which makes the tournament itself a bit of a joke.
Yeah, the line between AAA and Indy games is kinda blurred at this point. Especially because quality has split into production quality and gameplay quality and higher production quality seems to be getting more accessible to smaller dev teams.
Like I’ve been playing Enshrouded and have been enjoying it. It’s a large game (like I think the map is comparable to a WoW continent with fewer total regions but each region is larger… I think it’s a bit bigger than breath of the wild) but I have no idea if it would fall into the AAA box or not. Nothing about the game screams “Indy” or “small development team” other than the game being (IMO) really well done and not feeling like a product of a ??? step between “start making game” and “profit” like so many AAA games have felt like with all their season passes and MTX.
Ultimately, “good game” vs “bad game” is more important than “AAA” vs “Indy” (or whatever other categories), which is why I first asked about it. My bias has gotten to the point where I’ll ignore a lot of the games that look like they are AAA games tuned for engagement and profit rather than necessarily being fun, but I could be missing out.
Any AWD Lambo in Gran Turismo. Especially after getting used to powerful RWD supercars.
With FWD cars you start out with, you can pretty much go from full throttle to threshold braking back to full throttle as aggressively as you want while taking turns. As long as your speed is low enough to go around a corner, you’ll make it and if you make a mistake, you have a chance at recovery.
With RWD, you’ve gotta be super careful with the throttle on turns. If you try the instantly apply full throttle approach, you’ll end up spinning out when the rear tires (that provide stability) lose traction. A lot of the videos of people fucking up their supercar are instances of being too aggressive on the throttle when they weren’t going perfectly straight. I’m not sure how accurate Gran Turismo is for this, but you can give it full throttle while cornering, but you have to ease into it slowly. You don’t have much opportunity for correction, though with careful throttle control you can sometimes turn it into a drift, though that usually doesn’t work out unless you plan on drifting going in to the turn.
With AWD, just point the tires in the direction you want to go in and give it full throttle. Start losing traction? Try more throttle. It was a fun moment discovering this, after being used to the RWD approach. Might need to max out your tires and tune your suspension for stability to get these results, though. Just angle the tires outwards a bit for camber, go as low as you can without seeing sparks, and add some downforce on the front and back and it feels a bit like an F1 car.
Though the actual F1 cars they have are pretty awesome, too. A step closer to the arcade style racing where you didn’t need to learn the brake button.
That might bias the results towards gaming cafes and people building test machines. Cases where an account is used but a single snapshot doesn’t necessarily reflect what they normally use or that would capture the same machine multiple times.
Lol if that game is ever finished, I bet there’s going to be some people who paid way too much for a ship that turns out to completely suck but seemed ok on paper. Kinda like a PT cruiser, except it looked ok on paper.
It’s interesting how much the general attitude has changed about shit like that. In the 90s, I didn’t think twice about it, it was just a normal thing to imagine going to some location, killing anything that reacted with hostility to your presence, and taking back whatever you “found” for a vanity display or profit.
My reaction to Indiana Jones’ “it belongs in a museum!” was that he was virtue signalling (back before it was even called that). I guess the bright side is that, even as a kid, I thought the idea that museums having some kind of special claim on anything was ridiculous.
I’m glad I’ve had a few epiphanies over my gaming time that have resulted in no desire to spend any money on P2W or content skipping.
First one was in the first Turok game on N64. I was playing normally but at some point looked up the cheat codes for things like unlock all weapons, unlimited ammo, and unlocking all levels. There was one weapon that you needed to collect hidden pieces of from each level, and then you only got 3 shots with it that would pretty much AoE clear an area. There was another gun that you’d only find 2 shots of ammo for at a time that was similar. I had fun for a bit running around and shooting those guns at will, but after that it was hard to get motivated to play the game without the cheats because I knew the big weapons were basically just temporary consumables, which meant I’d probably never use them while trying to ration them for moments they’d be most useful. Using those cheat codes ruined the game for me.
The second epiphany was after raiding for a while in WoW and thinking about the loot motivation. It was a circular motivation: you get better loot so that you can raid more to get even better loot. If the loot was the main motivation, then it was pointless because the loot didn’t serve any purpose outside of the game. So it only made sense to do raiding because I enjoyed the process, not because of the rewards. And this applied to most reward mechanisms in games. Taking that logic just a bit further made me realize that P2W is actually paying money to avoid playing a game and short circuit right to getting the rewards, which was kinda pointless when the rewards were meant to improve the experience of playing the game. Either a) you don’t want to play the game at all, or b) you don’t get as much satisfaction from using the better loot or whatever because you skipped the part where you had to do it without those rewards.
And then the last one is finding PvP less satisfying when the game mechanics give significant advantages based on either time spent grinding or paying money to avoid grinding. Did I just win because of my skills or because I’ve acquired better gear? Did I just lose because the other player outplayed me or because they got better gear? And I didn’t even want to give any satisfaction to those who just paid money to win and don’t worry about what it does or doesn’t say about their skills. It’s similar to the line of thought when you know cheating is possible… Did I get beat by someone skilled enough to aim better or someone using an aim bot?